Operators of mobile systems, such as universal mobile telecommunications systems (UMTS) and its offspring including LTE (long term evolution) and LTE-advanced, are increasingly relying on wireless small cell radio access networks (RANs) in order to deploy indoor voice and data services to enterprises and other customers. Such small cell RANs typically utilize multiple-access technologies capable of supporting communications with multiple users using radio frequency (RF) signals and sharing available system resources such as bandwidth and transmit power.
Planning a deployment of radio cells is a complex task, which requires taking into consideration a variety of parameters. The planning is particularly difficult for the deployment of radio cells inside a building. For instance, the parameters that typically need to be taken into consideration include: a particular layout of the building, propagation and absorption characteristics of the building, specific radio interface(s) supported by the radio cells, specific characteristics of the radio cells, interferences between radio cells, etc. To obtain an optimal coverage, the deployed radio cells need to be positioned close enough to each other, while at the same time minimizing interference between them. Also, the position of each radio cell should be selected judiciously to minimize the total number of radio cells required to obtain optimal coverage.